A Moral Blueprint for Reimagining Capitalism | Manish Bhardwaj | TED

39,713 views ・ 2022-11-22

TED


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00:03
Folks, in 2022, we know capitalism has a problem.
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The system that undergirds much of our way of life in the West
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is exacerbating injustice and inequality.
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We know that women still get paid less than men.
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This is 2022.
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And the share of the bottom half of the world’s population and wealth
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is just two percent.
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We know that the playing field is not level.
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And yet, even as we are awash in new ideas and thinking and approaches,
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technologies and gadgets,
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we somehow do not seem to know how to address the fundamental problems
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at the heart of it all.
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Now I can’t claim to have all the answers,
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but today I want to talk to you about a tool
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that can help us design more just systems.
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And that tool is moral clarity.
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Now, moral clarity is not an ideology.
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It's not righteousness.
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Moral clarity is doing the right thing because it is right
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and not from fear of sanction or an expectation of reward.
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It is clarity of the demands that we are allowed to make of others.
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It is to never confuse what we ought to do with what we can do.
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No one ought to starve.
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No one ought to be discriminated against.
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No one ought to profit from suffering.
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These are not personal preferences.
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These are moral imperatives that most people believe in --
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(Applause)
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whatever their politics or culture.
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And this is what gives us the basis
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to build more just organizations, communities
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and, ultimately, a more just world.
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So, folks, how do we do it?
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First, if we want justice, let's use the language of justice,
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the language of right and wrong.
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Take stakeholder capitalism,
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this notion that a company is responsible to all its stakeholders
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and to the environment,
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and not just its shareholders.
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How well has it done?
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Well, we have data that shows that as a group,
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companies that subscribe to stakeholder capitalism
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did no better supporting their employees in the pandemic
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than companies that made no such pledge.
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Why?
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It’s not because stakeholder capitalism is a charade
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or its ends are not noble or its metrics broken
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or incentives misaligned.
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It's because we have been selling stakeholder capitalism
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as a way to reduce risk and ensure long-term growth and profits.
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Take, for instance: Why should a workplace be diverse?
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And this is what I hear all the time:
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“So it better reflects our customers, allowing us to build better products,
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so we can improve retention, so we can increase innovation and profit.”
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Alright. But what if you already have record-setting profits?
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What if your products are already all the rage?
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What [about] when there are far easier alternatives to increasing profits
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than the difficult work of organizational change?
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What then?
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What then will motivate us to stay the course?
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So, folks, I need you.
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Let’s come together and set the narrative straight.
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Here, let's say this loud and clear.
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We want every workplace to affirm women,
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minorities and every group that is underrepresented --
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not in expectation of more innovation or profit or retention,
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but because it is the right thing to do. It is the just thing to do,
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because that is what we ought to do.
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(Applause)
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Now, I’m not minimizing the difficulty of organizational change.
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I run an organization.
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I understand the competing demands and priorities.
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Reconciling what we ought to do with what we can do
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is necessarily imperfect.
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Moral clarity is not moral perfection.
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It is moral alertness.
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I'm also not minimizing or saying that innovation or better products
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or retention are not worthy goals.
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My point is, let's start making space in our organizations for moral language
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and clear moral arguments.
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Now --
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(Applause)
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There was a time in America
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when you could start as a custodian or in the mail room
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and rise through the ranks, even to the top job.
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Now that doesn't happen anymore.
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We have outsourced those jobs.
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We have turned them into gig work.
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And the problem is not just the low wages or poor benefits
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or the unpredictable working hours.
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The problem is we know nothing,
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nothing about the lives of so many who make our own possible.
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We don't know that the worker in our cafeteria is sleeping in her car
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so she can work three jobs to send her kids to college.
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We don't know that the worker in our warehouse
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has uncontrolled diabetes,
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even though he has health insurance.
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But he doesn't have the time to manage this chronic condition.
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Folks, how can we be just if these indignities are hidden from us,
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if they don't show up in our accounting?
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How can lives matter, truly matter to us,
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if you only read about them?
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If you don’t encounter them?
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If you don’t share in their humanity?
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So, it shouldn’t take a hot labor market
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for us to invest in our entry-level employees.
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And let's not stop at tuition subsidies and training.
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Let's do the harder work of mentoring those
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who do not show up on our organizational charts.
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Let's understand their aspirations and connect them to opportunities,
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even if those are outside our firms.
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Next.
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Let's get rid of the idea that a smart app or gadget or technology or business model
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will fix injustice.
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It will not!
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(Applause)
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Justice requires accompaniment,
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staying by a person's side until right is done.
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I started a nonprofit that provides health care
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to the rural poor in India,
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and we realized very early on
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that we could have all the therapeutics and health care workers and facilities,
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but we would not transform outcomes
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until we accompanied literally our patients.
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So, in our maternal and neonatal health program,
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expectant mothers have us on speed dial.
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They call us as soon as they go into labor,
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and we stay beside them, literally,
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till they make it to the delivery room in time.
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Why? Because the barriers are too numerous to predict.
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Flooded roads, an unwilling patriarch,
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a labor nurse who will not assist a woman of another caste.
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And that is why we journey to distant cities if we have to,
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and we find a neonatal ICU
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and stay by the side of an anxious mother and her newborn
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until they are both well.
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And that is how we have cut mortality rates in half in our program
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when everyone around us told us that it was impossible.
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(Applause)
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Accompaniment is not just about health care.
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In the United States,
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low-income students drop out of community colleges at record rates
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because of the barriers they face.
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They may not have the fare for public transport to attend classes.
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They may not have the child care to make it to a job interview.
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They may be struggling with homelessness or hunger.
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Now, financial assistance is crucial, and we need more of it.
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But it will not by itself transform outcomes.
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What we also need are seasoned advisors who can accompany our students,
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who can help them pick majors and classes, teach them study techniques,
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provide career counseling and help them juggle home, work and college.
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And now we have rigorous evidence
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that these accompaniment-centered interventions
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that address a whole array of barriers
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can double graduation rates.
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This is from the City University of New York's ASAP initiative.
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Accompaniment is not just for nonprofits.
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As we try to reimagine and reconfigure work
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and inclusion
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in the wake of the pandemic,
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accompaniment is that principled approach that can get us there.
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Now, for all of these ideas to take root and endure,
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we need to make moral clarity foundational to our educational system.
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A recent college poll showed that graduating college students
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consider working for social change less likely
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than they did as freshmen.
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Our students spend all their time becoming skilled specialists.
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They accrue credentials for everything --
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everything except for the difficult work of making the world just.
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I teach a course, Entrepreneurship for the Idealist,
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at Princeton University,
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which trains students in moral clarity
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so they can go out and make the world just.
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We can teach our students the language of right and wrong
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and give them the courage to use it.
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We can teach them the nature of injustice
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so they have a fighting chance at dismantling it.
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And we can train them in accompaniment.
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We don't expect families to train humanists or scientists or engineers.
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So let's stop making moral clarity
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the sole responsibility of families or of religion.
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(Applause)
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Now, some of you may be thinking that all of this is too hard.
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That this is unrealistic.
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And I can understand that. I've been doing this a long time.
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Let's stop worrying about being realistic.
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(Applause)
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Last year, folks,
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we invested 621 billion dollars globally in startups,
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in dreams, in visions,
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in visions of worlds transformed by new technologies,
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in visions of planets colonized and of alternate universes.
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Now, many of those dreams will fail.
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Many of those dreams will take decades to materialize.
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But will we flinch?
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No, we'll double down. Such is our faith in those visions.
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Folks, if we are trying to do something truly hard,
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I want us to come together to do the hardest thing there is:
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envision and then build a just world.
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Not a prosperous world. Not a frictionless world.
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Not a resilient world, but a just world.
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(Applause)
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Now in our time, the call to do the right thing because it is right,
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because it is just,
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evokes a certain wistfulness.
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It has that quality of a once-beloved melody
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whose notes now elude us.
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We are worried that if we sing the tune,
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it's going to land just a bit flat in our time.
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And the reason is
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the foundational myth of our political and economic systems
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that people will do only that which is advantageous to them.
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So while we never shun our idealism,
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it's a stubborn thing we learn early on
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to wear it lightly.
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Folks, let's stop selling ourselves short.
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We are capable of being small, but we are not small beings.
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We help strangers whom we know we will never see again.
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We grieve.
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We grieve for strangers who are oceans away.
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In the expectation of what reward
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are Polish mothers leaving their strollers
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on train stations
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so Ukrainian mothers fleeing,
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dispossessed and broken, will find some respite?
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Yes, we are driven by incentives.
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But we are also driven by love,
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mercy, kindness, justice, solidarity.
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Folks,
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I have an abiding faith in our idealism,
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in mine and in yours. And here’s why.
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Our pursuits may be different,
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our politics may be different,
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our motivations will always be many.
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But our deepest longing has always been the same:
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to find our humanity,
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to fathom that magnificent vastness within each of us.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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